Small Kitchen Cooking: Taco Tuesday + Southwestern Salad

For this new Small Kitchen Cooking series, I won’t always note it in the post title (like I’m doing right now). The reason for that is because, hopefully, most of the recipes I post will be blog-worthy on their own – tiny kitchen or not. I’ll still tag those as small kitchen appropriate, so be sure to check the tag in the word cloud if you’re interested. Some recipes, however, are those that I wouldn’t normally post on the blog because they seem too simple or similar to things I’ve posted. However, when looking through the lens of offering inspiration for mini kitchen cooking, I thought these recipes suddenly deserved some love. In these cases, I’ll call it out right there in the post title. Like “hey! Did you forget this meal you probably already love is perfect to make in your minuscule kitchen?!”

The first meal that falls into this “duh” camp is Taco Tuesday. You may not realize it at first, but taco bars are comprised primarily of stovetop cooked fillings and refrigerated toppings. So easy! As long as you go with chicken, shrimp, or ground beef instead of steak or carnitas, this is a very tiny kitchen-friendly meal.

This week (yes, we pretty much do Taco Tuesday weekly in our house) I kept the tacos super simple: chicken that I cut into tiny cubes, tossed with taco seasoning and fresh lime juice, and sauted with olive oil for just a few minutes. Because our tiny kitchen also comes with a tiny apartment, I try to save space in all things, so I corralled the toppings (shredded cheese, cilantro, sour cream, salsa, and avocado) onto one plate.

For the veggie/side dish, I decided to make a Southwestern style salad. Ingredients are as follows:

Note: cheese and avocado would be great in here, but I was already using those ingredients in my tacos and wanted to keep the overall meal on the healthier side. In fact, if you wanted, you could say buh bye to the tacos and simply put the chicken, cheese, and avocado on top of the salad and make that your full meal.